Connections: Or, How Senses are Fluids In Motion
by silentmusic16
Summary: A lost recorder and a lost voice. What happened? This is the second in my "author style imitation" AU oneshot series - read the author's note in the story for more info on that. Completed.


**So this is the second (and actually most recently conceptualized and typed up) of the three "in the author's style/my new style" oneshots. This one is closest to the way my favorite author writes, both in the voice of the story and it's concept. It seems lazy to steal someone else's writing style, but I've actually heard that many authors promote that in people's early writing, as it helps them form their own unique styles.**

****Also, I don't want to seem selfish, but, while I appreciate all of the author alerts/favorite stories/author watches, I _really_ need actual feedback and reviews and criticism. Even if you hate the story, I want to hear it. Any and all reviews are welcome, as they all help me improve my writing and such.** **

**I've rambled too much, so I'll shut up now. Enjoy!**

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><p>About a month ago, for a few weeks, I wasn't able to talk. It wasn't a medical problem, and it wasn't psychological. I just lost the ability to talk. Friends and family tried to help me, but nothing they tried done worked. Lemon tea didn't work, a psychiatrist couldn't help, a doctor couldn't find anything wrong; they all were stumped. My vocal chords didn't seem to be damaged and I didn't have any repressed memories or anything, I just couldn't talk.<p>

The last time I could talk, however, was the day I was moving out of my apartment and into a new one closer to my office.

It was a hot, sunny, windy day in July and outside, the cicadas were sounding their droning waves. Inside, I set the air conditioning to 65 and got to work. I finished packing a few boxes and moved most of them to my car. My best friend Axel was helping me and so we were using his car to transport my stuff to my new apartment as well. He and I had known each other since college, and so he immediately agreed to help me when I asked.

"Is there anything else?" he asked when the place seemed empty.

"Just one box. I'll get it, you go start your car." I answered.

He shrugged and walked out, combat boots banging on the floor carelessly like drums.

From my pocket I pulled out a recorder I had been using for the past month to record some of the thoughts and ideas and interview questions that popped into my head – and, unfortunately, out of just as quickly.

"Well," I started "It's July 7th. Moving day. It feels kind of weird to leave after living here for a year, but hey, everything changes eventually."

With my thoughts digitally stored, I placed the recorder on the final box and lifted it up. As I walked out, I heard some sort of noise, but I assumed it was only the slamming of the trees against the windows caused by the gusts outside.

When I got into my car I motioned for Axel to start driving in his. He drove to the apartment building and I followed close behind.

About 15 minutes later we reached my new building. It was a bigger place, and definitely a lot grander than my old one, but I could afford it due to my recent raise. The floor was made of shiny white marble, the walls made of glittering stone. Speaking of the walls, there were some that had water flowing out of them into a tiny rock basin below - indoor waterfalls, as fancy as they get. Around the room were potted plants; exotic flowers, impeccably pruned trees, the whole 9 yards. Above me, a high ceiling with 3 lazily spinning fans circulated cool air around the room. Not that the fans were necessary, however, as the place itself had central air conditioning. At the front desk, a happy woman in her mid-thirties was taking a call. I walked up to the desk to take ask her for my keys when I noticed that I couldn't talk.

"…" I tried speaking, but nothing came out. My mouth moved, but produced no sounds.

"Can I help you?" she asked with a tilt of the head. She looked confused, but I couldn't really blame her.

"…" Again, nothing.

"Roxas, is everything okay?" Axel asked.

I turned to him and tried again to speak, but of course, there was nothing. I turned back to the front desk woman and moved my hands to signify a pen and paper, which she handed to me, still very confused and probably a bit scared.

I scribbled out "Can't speak, don't know why".

On the other side, I wrote my name and that I would like my keys.

"D-do you have any ID sir?" the woman asked, still shaken.

I nodded and showed her my driver's license. Without speaking, she handed me my keys.

"Do you want to go to the doctor's or something?" Axel asked.

I shook my head no and pointed up the stairs. He sighed, picked up the 2 boxes he was carrying (one on top of the other) and followed me up the stairs.

In all the confusion I didn't notice the missing recorder. We unpacked everything very quickly and only then did I allow my worried best friend to take me to the hospital.

~X~

"Well, Roxas, it doesn't seem like there's anything physically wrong with you. When did this 'speechlessness' start?" The doctor, a tall, aging man with a short blonde beard, looked at me in a puzzled way as he spoke. He had just finished checking the inside of my mouth and throat with a small flashlight. I could still taste the latex glove he had in my mouth. It wasn't a very nice taste at all.

"Earlier today" I wrote on a pad of paper he gave me. On a rolling chair to the side of me, Axel sat, clearly enjoying the confusion of the doctor.

"I see. Well, perhaps it's something psychological. Can I recommend you a psychiatrist that would be covered under your insurance?"

I nodded.

The doctor wrote a name on a prescription pad and ripped it off before handing it to me. "Dr. Xemnas should be able to help you. I've heard good things about him."

I wrote "Thank you" on the pad and stuffed the name of the psychologist into my jacket pocket. When the doctor turned around, I took the pad and put it into my other jacket pocket and walked out with Axel sniggering behind me.

"So, Mr. Mute, what're you going to do now? How are you supposed to tell the psych your 'deepest, most secret feelings'?"

On the pad I scribbled some curses down and slammed it into his face. He just laughed harder.

~X~

It was 2 days later, a Monday, and I was face to face with my boss. He was an older man, balding and developing a beer belly from years of going to the bar night after night. There were dark rings under his eyes.

"So what you're telling me is that you've lost the ability to talk."

I nodded once.

"And I'm supposed to believe that? How do I know you're not just lying?"

On the notepad I _borrowed _from the hospital, I wrote "Why would I lie about something like this? Haven't I been a good employee up until now?"

He considered this for a while before realizing that I was right. What could I have gained from lying about not being able to speak? My boss pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and I tapped a song on my thighs with my hands. _"Flight Test"_ by the Flaming Lips.

"Roxas, you do realize that you're job as an interviewer for our magazine requires you to speak, right?"

Again, I nodded.

"I guess I'll just have to give you an editing job, at least until this whole thing clears up. Report back tomorrow and I'll have opened up something, alright?"

"Thanks!" I wrote.

He just sighed, and I walked out.

~X~

I arrived at the psychiatrist later that same Monday. He went over the same stuff you'd expect him to have.

"Did something bad happen in your past?"

"No." I wrote.

"Anything you feel like you're repressing?"

I held up the sign again.

"Has anything like this happened to you before?"

Yet again, the same sign.

"Well then, It seems like I can't help you."

Needless to say, he wasn't a very good psychiatrist. And, unfortunately, he was all my insurance would cover.

After I left that place, I wandered into a 99cents store and brought myself a portable dry-erase board and a pack of dry-erase markers. I knew I'd need them until my voice returned.

And so I lived life pretty normally after that; I went to work, hung out with my friends, cooked, cleaned, read, all of the things I normally did, only I couldn't speak. Anytime that I needed to say something, I'd write it down on my dry-erase board and other people would read it. I informed anyone who I thought would call me that I couldn't speak and sent a lot of emails and text messages instead. In those few weeks, nothing changed with my condition. It didn't get worse and it didn't get better, it just stayed the way it was.

It wasn't until I finally checked that last box that I took from my old apartment that I realized that my recorder was missing. I searched everywhere for it; in my drawers, on my shelves, in the laundry – everywhere. I practically turned my new apartment upside-down looking for it, but it was gone.

It was then that I remembered the sound I'd heard when I was leaving. It wasn't the blinds; it was the recorder as it fell! Immediately I knew that there was some connection between my lost voice and the missing recorder and the next day I visited my old apartment.

It was July 27, exactly 20 days since I'd lost my voice. Just like 20 days earlier, it was hot, sunny, and windy – a typical July day. I entered my old building and a wave of nostalgia hit me, but it also came with the feeling of being lost. This was my old home, but it felt different, less comforting and more foreign. I shook off the thought and walked up the stairs to my old apartment.

Armed with my dry-erase board already loaded with the words "Hello, I'm Roxas, the old owner of this apartment" and a marker, I knocked on door number 13. For about a minute, there was no answer. Then the door opened and before me stood a blonde girl around my age (24, if you didn't know) and about a head-and-a-half shorter than me. Her hair was straight and somewhat long, though most of it rested on her right shoulder. With a plain blue t-shirt and a pair of denim shorts, she looked both cute and relaxed, though there was a hint of worry on her face. I'd be worried too if a stranger just showed up at my door unannounced.

For about a minute we stood there, just staring, until she asked "Um…Is there something I can help you with?". She was clearly nervous.

I picked up my dry-erase board, allowed her to read it, and then wrote "I'm sorry, I can't talk, and so I'll use this to communicate".

"I'm Namine." She held out her hand and I shook it. I re-wrote my name on the wipe-off board.

"Okay then, is something wrong?"

"You didn't happen to find a recorder when you moved in, did you?" I wrote.

Her eyes lit up. "I did!"

"Great!"

"Here, come inside and I'll get it for you."

I nodded and followed her in.

The apartment looked completely different from when I lived there, but that was to be expected. Now there was an area rug under a wooden coffee table, new couches and a recliner, and new shelves lining the walls. The shelves were lined with books, more than even I had (which was a considerable amount). In the kitchen, shiny silver appliances were neatly situated on the counter and a small, round, 4 person table made up the dining room.

"Follow me." She said, and I did.

Namine led me into her room, which was white with light blue stripes (unless it was light blue with white stripes) and then to a shelf covered with an assortment of items. From what I could gather, there was no rhyme or reason to the odd collection on the shelf; what did a lighter, a signed baseball, 4 guitar picks, an NES remote with a torn wire, an old fashioned pocket watch, and 2 unused tickets to a movie that wasn't playing anymore have in common? I couldn't even tell how they'd all gotten up there, as the girl seemed too short to reach it without standing on her tip-toes, and even then she could hardly see over. I…admired the scene from behind anyway, what with her shirt pulling up until I could see her lower back and the way the denim shorts hugged her lower body.

"Here." She said as she handed the recorder to me. Her hands seemed to unconsciously pull at her shirt, wrinkled a bit from stretching up high. "I hope you don't mind, but I listened to some of it. Were those story ideas?"

"Yeah. Some of them were." I wrote.

Finally, with the small black machine in my hand, I felt as though I _needed_ to listen to that last message I spoke – my final words before my voice abandoned me.

I pressed the play button. "Well," my voice sounded odd coming out of the tiny singular speaker. "It's July 7th. Moving day. It feels kind of weird to leave after living here for the year, but hey, everything changes eventually."

After hearing my voice, I knew I could talk again. It all had to do with the recorder, like it stole my voice or something. And so I tried to speak.

"Is…is it over?" I asked.

Namine, who had been patiently watching me, suddenly looked shocked. "Wait...let me get this straight," she started. "You spoke into your recorder, lost it, and then lost your voice. And you just got your voice back after listening to that last recording. That was the order of events, right?"

"Just about. Why?"

While I expected my voice to have been dry and raspy from having not been used in 20 days, it wasn't; it was just the way it sounded before I lost it. Weird.

"It's just…well, it's hard to explain." She seemed conflicted.

"Want to tell me over some coffee? It's the least I could do to thank you."

She nodded and we headed to a close café in silence.

~X~

After receiving our coffee, Namine started talking.

"I had an experience just like yours, 6 years ago, when I was 16."

"Really?"

"Mhm. I'll never forget it. It was my birthday, and at about 2 in the afternoon my boyfriend came over and handed me a CD filled with sappy love songs, telling me that they all 'Represented how he felt about me'. He left not much later, and that night I listened to the album. At the end, however, was a song he himself recorded and sang. It ended with the words 'I love you, Namine', which I thought was the sweetest thing that anyone had ever done for me. Anyway, I put the CD away when I was finished with it and I drifted off to sleep.

A few hours later I felt my shoulders being shaken and I woke up. My clock said it was 2:30 in the morning. Above me was my mother, who seemed to be saying something, but I couldn't hear her. I couldn't hear anything. I was completely and utterly deaf."

"What happened then?" I asked.

Outside the coffee shop, the sun was just beginning to set, casting orange rays of light beaming through the large window we were sitting in front of. I had to shield my eyes, but Namine was already sitting in the shadows that had yet to take over the world for the night.

Namine took a sip of coffee, cleared her throat, and then continued.

"I pulled out a notebook I had in a dresser near my bed and wrote, telling my mom that I couldn't hear her. She seemed to say 'What?', but of course, I couldn't tell. On the same notebook I used, my mother wrote that my boyfriend had gone missing, and left a note saying only 'It's time for me to be going'. For some reason my mom seemed to have completely disregarded the weirdness of me just losing my hearing, but perhaps it was just because of the circumstances surrounding my boyfriend. She also wrote that there were police officers waiting for me in the living room, as they wanted to question the last person to see him alive – me.

Just as she said, there were two officers waiting for me down stairs. My mother quickly filled them in on my hearing loss, and they wrote out their questions: 'Were you the last to see him alive', 'Did he tell you anything suspicious, or act strangely', 'Do you know where he might be'. I shook my head yes, no, and no respectively. When they left, my mother took me to the hospital, but he said that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my ears, and in fact, they were some of the best ears he's seen. We were puzzled, but for a week I couldn't hear (and by extension, speak) and my boyfriend couldn't be found."

I later found out that the doctor Namine had seen in the hospital was the same man who examined me - a Dr. Ansem.

"Finally, exactly 1 week later," she continued "they found his body floating under a pier not too far from here. His death was deemed a suicide and his parents held a funeral for him that day, as all of the arrangements had been made beforehand in case the worst scenario was the one that had actually transpired. At the funeral, after I passed the open coffin and gave him one last look, I could suddenly hear everything again. My hearing had returned to normal and for no reason at all. Life went on normally, but never again did I listen to that mix-tape. I do still have it, I just never dared to listen to it again. Just in case, you know?"

"Wow…I don't know what to say. Did you ever find out why that happened?"

"No." she answered after some time "But over the years I have given it a lot of thought. The only conclusion I could come up with is that hearing my name last in his voice gave him some sort of hold over my hearing, due to the feelings we shared and how special I felt that he made me a song and such. When he died and disappeared, however, his end of those feelings died along with him and my end was left connected to nothing, just a void, just a cold, dead shell. With no conclusion for me because he wasn't found, I was helpless and I couldn't sever the connection. Hope was probably the binding factor, hope that he was still alive somewhere out there. Hope that perhaps we could be happy together when he returned. But when I saw his body, the hope disappeared and there was a disconnection. That disconnection gave me my hearing back.

Now, if I may, I have my own theory for your problem."

"Go ahead. It's as good of a guess as any."

"You seemed to have put your thoughts and your trust into that recorder. It was the last thing to hear your voice, right?"

"Right."

"Because of that, when you lost it, you lost your voice. It held it for you within its own digital memory and took that same memory – the memory of your voice – away from you. Hearing it again was what brought your voice back, and that's because your memory and the recorder's memory was connected once again."

"So if you're correct, does that mean that I can never lose this thing or break it or anything?"

I motioned for the waitress to bring us more coffee, which she did.

"No, I don't think it matters anymore. Now that the connection is back and you talked to me, your voice is now in my own memories. Even if you were to lose the recorder right this instant, you wouldn't lose your voice because I heard it last, because of that connection. Still, if you want to be safe, I'd add someone into the conversation anytime you speak into that machine. Just in case."

I smiled at her, and she smiled back.

A few minutes of silence passed with both of us looking out the window and into the sunset.

"Life is full of connections, isn't it?" she said.

I let the question hang. There wasn't anything I could answer with anyway.

~X~

For me, life went back to normal; I got my old interviewing job back, I could yell with Axel as we watched soccer and drank, and I could talk to people again. The connection theory stayed in the back of my mind all the time, and so I always spoke to someone right after I entered anything into my recorder. To use one of Namine's favorite phrases, it was "just in case."

Speaking of Namine, she and I met up a couple times after that day and, eventually, we started going out. This worked out perfectly, as not only did we care for each other, but we kept our voice and hearing connections working fine. She would remember my voice for me, and I'd act as her back-up ears anytime someone spoke to us. It was a win-win situation.

Still, I was always very cautious with my voice ever since I got it back, because I knew that if I were to ever lose it again it would be for good this time. It was just a feeling I had, but I knew to trust it. Without feelings like thay, I probably would never have gotten my voice back in the first place.

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><p><strong>I hope you enjoyed the story! The third in the series should be released soon, but I'm not sure when. Also, in case you haven't noticed, none of the stories are actually connected in anyway. They're just lumped together for the purpose of the writing style practice.<strong>

**I decided to go with the title that I chose because I _love_ the way old non-fiction books were titled like that (nowadays, fiction books are titled like that for style). **

**Again, I really need reviews! Thanks for reading!**


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